By Chris Ihidero
I am a city boy; always been and always will be. I was born in Lagos and I’m a Lagosian, irrespective of Governor Fashola’s new deportation scheme and the arrogance (and ignorance) of some people who are ‘originally’ from Lagos and insist you can’t be Lagosian except you’re originally from Lagos.
I work and pay my taxes in Lagos; that’s about all you want from a citizen of any place. My father is from Edo State; I have never been to my village and I don’t feel bad about that. I do not feel as if there’s anything missing in my life because I have never been to ‘my’ village. I also do not speak ‘my’ language. Again, I do not see the big deal with speaking that language. My mother is Ijebu and I speak Yoruba. I have been to my mother’s village a couple of time for burials and so on…that’s about it.
Recently I spent about eight days in a village in Enugu State, shooting a short film on HIV/AIDS. It’s the longest time I have ever spent in a village at a go.
The first thing that hits you is of course the silence. If you live in Lagos or any other cosmopolitan space, noise is a permanent feature in your life. To meet near absolute silence as one meanders through rocky and erosion-impacted roads can be unnerving. The woman walking down the road carrying few pieces of firewood looks like she’s only concerned about the fire to be made tonight and perhaps in the morning…the tendency to live in bulk is what cities impose on us. City life, ever on a hustle overdrive, has little patience for living on a need-only basis; time isn’t available to do things is small ways.
Of course village people would be more friendly than city folks; that’s to be expected. To see unfamiliar faces isn’t what happens everyday in a village and the tendency to be accommodating and offer a smile is of course very high. But, perhaps because I’m not used to village settings, I found this intriguing. The often talked about aggressiveness of Igbo people was missing everywhere I looked, perhaps as the village’s ambience did not encourage violence. This got me thinking: How much of the violence and aggression easily noticeable in a place like Lagos is merely due to the environment, both physical and spiritual?
For those of you who have connections to your village, all of this will sound normal and familiar. For those who are city aficionados like me, it’s an intriguingly new experience, one that you long for while knowing that you can actually never live like this. To have a 5 litre bottle of fresh palmwine delivered to your house every morning; to hear the chirping of birds and crickets during quiet evenings and nights is alluring; to eat food with condiments plucked from the farm next door; to spend eight days without being harassed by generators…luxury city dwellers cannot afford.
In end though, you begin to miss the adrenaline rush of the city. The silence begins to get to you. You get tired of even the fresh palmwine. You just want to go, to go back to everything you complain about in the city; you want to hug Lagos tightly and whisper: ‘I missed you’. That’s life, I guess; that’s the insatiable nature of human wants which makes us all long for that which we don’t have but once we get it, we want to return to what we had and moaned about, this time with fresh loving.
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